1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a self service terminal for use in the lodging industry. More particularly, the present invention is an apparatus and a method of checking guests into and out of a lodging facility advantageously including the dispensing of an appropriate room key upon check-in, automatic, that is, without the necessity for intervention by employees of the lodging facility during routine transactions.
2. Prior Art
In a lodging environment, customer transaction handling and room assignment is a time consuming routine involving many decisions and much information handling. Rooms are not fungible goods for many reasons. First, a guest must be provided with a particular room and the associated key for his exclusive use while the lodging facility has a record of which room is assigned to that particular guest so that it may handle his bills, mail and phone calls. Further, since various rooms may have differing functional and/or aesthetic difference, such as furnishings, quality, or charge rates, a mechanism must exist for selecting among the various types of rooms and assigning a guest to the proper room type. It is well known that hotels might have rooms with single beds, room with double beds, suites, and/or premium location rooms such as ocean-side, pool-side, or executive floor rooms, all of which might have differing availability or daily charge rates. Because of this variation, employees of a lodging facility had traditionally manually selected an appropriate room type and located the key associated with the room. This manual process of registering a guest and providing him his key is labor-intensive and error-prone.
In the environment of a lodging facility, a customer checking in requires the specific key unique to the room to which he is assigned. That room number must be associated with his name to facilitate phone calls, room charges, mail delivery and visitors. There is no indication that any automated apparatus has been suggested heretofore, which accomplishes in a lodging environment, the automatic supply of keys to incoming guests and the recovery of keys from departing guests.
Thus, it will be seen that the operation of a lodging facility is quite complex and has historically required significant amount of labor to select and assign rooms and dispense a key associated with the type of room assigned and recover the key at check out. These labor requirements are aggravated by widely varying numbers of personnel requiring service during the course of a day. Many people will check out during 7-9 a.m. and many will check in during 5-9 p.m., while few people will be doing either during the intermediate period.
The operation of a lodging facility has also historically required personnel to handle transactions when a guest checks out of the facility. A statement of the guest's account must be located and presented to the guest to determine his acceptance of it, a printed copy of the statement must be provided to the guest and his key collected during his checkout procedure. This has again requires employee labor, with its disadvantages including costs.
It has been suggested that a self service terminal patterned after an automatic teller machines the banking industry might be used to accomplish some of the front desk operations in a lodging facility. In a brochure entitled, "NCR 1810 Self Service Terminal for the Lodging Industry" a system is proposed for semi-automatic guest check-in and check-out which uses a credit card for identification and prints a registration form upon check-in and a guest folio (or statement) upon check-out. However, this system requires that the lodging guest use both the self service terminal for the registration and separately acquire his key from an employee at another location, as by showing the registration form to the hotel personnel at the front desk to obtain the appropriate key upon check-in. The system described in the brochure also does not address collecting a key from a departing guest, leading to the loss of hotel keys and the additional attendant expenses, labor and security risk associated involved with lost keys. This system also presumes that the hotel personnel at the front desk can locate the key to the room assigned by the terminal to a given guest when the guest has obtained a room assigned by the terminal.
Self service terminals presently provide some automated capabilities in certain limited applications, most particularly, in the banking field for handling of routine financial transactions without the assistance of bank personnel. These terminals, which are perhaps better known as automatic teller machines or ATM's, have the capability of reading information from a credit card with a magnetic stripe, reacting interactively with a user to determine the transaction he wishes to accomplish, and either accepting a deposit from the customer, or dispensing cash to the customer. Some ATM's also accommodate an appropriate transfer of funds from one customer account to another or facilitate other transactions such as making a loan payment from the customer's account. In dispensing money to a customer, the apparatus is dispensing essentially fungible goods, in that each $20 bill has an equal value and it matters not which $20 bill a particular customer receives, nor does the bank need to know which $20 bill has been disbursed to which customer.
Accordingly, the prior art systems for handling the checking in and checking out of lodging guests at a lodging facility, require personnel to address the "key" issues and are not automatic nor labor-free. Accordingly, such prior art systems have significant disadvantages and limitations.